German orthography reform of 1996

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The German orthography reform of 1996 (Reform der deutschen Rechtschreibung von 1996) was a change to German spelling and punctuation that was intended to simplify German orthography and thus to make it easier to learn,^[1] without substantially changing the rules familiar to users of the language.

The reform was based on an international agreement signed in Vienna in July 1996 by the governments of the German-speaking countries—Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Luxembourg did not participate despite having German as one of its three official languages: it regards itself "as a non-German-speaking country not to be a contributory determinant upon the German system of spelling",^[2] though it did eventually adopt the reform.

The reformed orthography became obligatory in schools and in public administration. However, there was a campaign against the reform, and in the resulting public debate the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany was called upon to delineate the extent of reform. In 1998^[3] the court stated that because there was no law governing orthography, outside of the school system people could spell as they liked, including the use of traditional spelling. In March 2006, the Council for German Orthography agreed unanimously to remove the most controversial changes from the reform; this was largely, though not completely, accepted by media organizations such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that had previously opposed the reform.^[4]

The rules of the new spelling concern the following areas: correspondence between sounds and written letters (this includes rules for spelling loan words), capitalisation, joined and separate words, hyphenated spellings, punctuation, and hyphenation at the end of a line. Place names and family names were excluded from the reform.